How to Make Your Food Look More Professional

The food in restaurants always looks so much more professional and refined than what you can make at home. How do they do it? After reading through countless books and doing some hands-on research, I have discovered three main methods on how cooking in a restaurant is different from how you do things in your own kitchen.

1) Pipes

Yes. Pipes. Remember when you order a cute appetizer or entrée from a high-end restaurant, and the food plating makes it so that your chicken or veal is contained within a perfect circle or square? How do they make it so neat? The answer is pipes. The exact same pipes, in fact, that you can buy at the Home Depot. What they do is take a small section of pipe, place that onto a plate, and use the pipe section to "mold" the food into a perfect, nice looking geometric shape. Try it sometime, and you will be getting those homemade appetizers looking like high cuisine in no time. Friends will be envious at how you can plate so neatly and professionally.

2) Sauce and Toothpicks

Another extra step that restaurants do with their food which you probably do not, is garnish everything. Aside from adding in obvious elements like a spring of parsley or a flower cut from carrots, dishes really can benefit a lot from color and shape that sauces can offer. On the latest Pillsbury Bake Off Contest, one contestant decorated his salmon puffs by first squeezing green-colored sauce onto the plate in a zigzag pattern. It certainly had something to do with how he got to the finalist round!

A quick way to add something special to a dish, to decorate the plate with sauce. There are two main ways to do this. If you are making a chocolate cake for example, you can set the cake on the plate, and then go over the entire plate with a bottle of chocolate sauce in a careful, zigzag motion. Another way to incorporate a sauce design, is to draw circles around the food (in a way that has larger and larger circles overlapping each other), and then drag a toothpick through the sauce.

The following is a picture link to an example; the person has made a zigzag pattern on the plate, and has dragged a toothpick through some parts of the sauce. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/elislider/148763611/in/set-72057594097406165/)

3) Chicken stock, beef stock, lobster stock, and more!

An excellent way to add extra flavor to a dish, is to use stock. Stock (and I don't mean the kind they trade on Wall Street) is a type of flavored liquid that helps create flavor in many types of dishes. Common types of stock include chicken, and beef, but there are also rarer types such as lobster available. Stock can easily be bought at the grocery store, but there are various recipes available online to make your own stock as well. Stock can also frozen if needed, and it is easy to toss in a few cubes of frozen stock into a dish if you want to add in some more flavor. There is a reason why so many recipes call for chicken stock, in particular, because it is an excellent base for dishes.